Here’s my hot take for today:
It is a bad thing to use AI to make music.
I’m preaching to the choir, probably. You’re nodding your head right now: “Yes, it is a bad thing. Music was so much better when it was made by humans, hand-stitched note by note like my gran’s afghan.”
Well, yes.
Judging by Rick Beato videos and various online comment sections, it seems many people have a vague, intuitive sense that summoning music from an algorithm is not as good as summoning it with your body.
In today’s email, I’d like to flesh out why I think this is true.
The argument for using AI to make music, as I understand it, boils down to one thing:
Convenience.
Folks who are in favor of AI-assisted music typically represent this feature in one of a few ways:
AI makes music creation more accessible. In other words, people who could not previously create music now can. Let’s say, for instance, that you’re a great songwriter, but you sing like a tone-deaf Kermit the Frog.
Not to worry! You can now use AI-generated vocal tracks to sound just like Freddie Mercury or Adele.
This, say some people, is good.
AI makes music creation easier and faster. I keep getting served this ad where a girl explains how she wrote the first verse to a song, only to hit writer’s block with the second verse.
Not to worry! She fed what she had into Suno (the king of AI music platforms at the moment), and it spit out not only a second verse but a bridge, too, all of it produced to sound – wonder of wonders! – like a perfect cardboard replica of your least-favorite song by FINNEAS.
This, say some people, is good.
And most people in favor of AI music stop here.
(A small minority go on to argue that more convenience leads to more creativity; for reasons you’ll find below, I think this is a difficult claim to make.)
But I think all of these arguments misunderstand what music is for.
If, as Tolstoy thought, the point of art is the communication of genuine emotion, then it’s hard to argue for the value of AI-generated art at all.
As listeners, we delight in the smug turn of a Taylor Swift lyric or the anthemic high of a Coldplay chorus because we believe we’re wired into real feelings from real people. It’s a punch in the gut to realize that you’ve bought into a fake feeling: like finding you’ve wept with someone who was only pretending to cry, or discovering that your favorite song was only ever a parody.
When the music is manufactured, the joke is on the listener.
If art is for relationship, who cares about convenience?
Yes, everyone should be able to make music. But everyone should not be able to make music like everyone else.
We have this cultural illusion that creativity is the absence of limits. Really things work the other way around. Art is the examination of limits, which is another way of saying that limits are what make creativity possible.
To put it practically: If Leonard Cohen could sing like Freddie Mercury, “Hallelujah” wouldn’t exist.
And making music creation easier and faster is only good if music should be easy and fast to make. But why should it be? Music isn’t water; we don’t have a scarcity problem. With 100,000 songs uploaded to Spotify every day, it’s safe to say the problem is in the other direction.
To overvalue convenience is to miss what music is for.
The process is the point.
The joy of a jigsaw puzzle isn’t the picture on the box. It’s doing the puzzle.
I remember reading an afterword from Robin Hobb, author of The Farseer Trilogy, in which she reflects on one of her central characters, the Fool.
The Fool is fascinating, the sort of character that makes a series. And yet, to hear Hobb tell it, he wasn’t created to make the series at all. Actually, she’d planned him as a throwaway side character. Fortunately, he had other plans for himself. He kept saying and doing interesting things until eventually he was alive, and with him the rest of the book.
This is so often how good art happens: It lives into itself. The wrong note leads to the right riff.
AI-assisted art is wonderfully convenient and magically fast. Hallelujah! No need for messy feelings. We’ve conquered creative output, finally severing it from the slow, painstaking process of making art.
But what if the slow, painstaking process is the art?
– Jon
